Screening strangers in Fortress Europe and beyond

Abstract

Abstract This article, responding to the current crisis of European cultural identity, goes beyond the specific national context of film production in Europe, and discusses how the issues of migration and diaspora are challenging the conflicting, and sometimes conflating, ideas of post-Europe, Fortress Europe, post-Holocaust Europe, New Europe, post-nation Europe and transnational Europe. It asks how the films dealing with migration and diaspora challenge European identity, particularly traditional notions of Europeanness, and how they subvert or/and reinforce hegemonic and counter-hegemonic attempts to construct and deconstruct European identity. Opening a cinematic window onto this struggle, the article determines cultural and political patterns in the representation and negotiation of European identity in several European films from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including Jasmin Dizdar’s Beautiful People (1999), Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), and Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (2002), Code 46 (2003) and The Road to Guantanamo (2006).